The Opposite of Music

by Janet Ruth Young

  How are the ECT treatments given?

  ECT may be given during a hospital stay, or a person can go to a hospital just for the treatment and then go home. ECT is given up to 3 times a week. Usually no more than 12 treatments are needed. Treatment is given by a psychiatrist.

  Before each treatment, an intravenous (IV) line will be started so medicine can be put directly into your blood. You will be given an anesthetic (medicine to put you into a sleeplike state) and a medicine to relax your muscles. Your heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing will be watched closely. After you are asleep, an electrical shock will be applied to your head. The shock will last only 1 or 2 seconds and will make your brain have a seizure. This seizure is controlled by medicines so that your body doesn’t move when you have the seizure.

  You will wake up within 5 to 10 minutes after the treatment and will be taken to a recovery room to be watched. When you are fully awake, you can eat and drink, get dressed, and return to your hospital room or go home.

  What are some side effects of ECT?

  Side effects may result from the anesthesia, the ECT treatment, or both. Common side effects include temporary short-term memory loss, nausea, muscle aches, and headache. Some people may have longer-lasting problems with memory after ECT. Sometimes a person’s blood pressure or heart rhythm changes. If these changes occur, they are carefully watched during the ECT treatments and are immediately treated.

  What happens after all of the ECT treatments are done?

  After you have finished all of your ECT treatments, you will probably be started on an antidepressant medicine. It is important for you to keep taking this medicine the way your doctor tells you to so that you won’t become depressed again.

  I ride home standing on the pedals instead of sitting on the seat. I take the route that allows me to coast down long hills. Triumph, it’s going to be all right!

  At home, Mom is checking the maintenance bills for Brooksbie while Dad allows Linda to give him a cucumber facial. I drop the printouts on Mom’s lap and she reads them quickly, her lips moving at certain key words. I was surprised that the treatments didn’t sound that bad. It looks like Mom might be right to go ahead, although I would never tell her so. When she’s done, she chucks me on the head and holds up the appointment slip like it’s a winning lottery ticket.

  VACILLATION

  But the night before Dad’s first treatment, I bike back to the library on the pretext of returning some books. The computer carrel I used last time is available. After all these months, is our problem really going to be solved so easily? I get on the Internet and search for the phrase “shock treatments.”

  The results that come up are different this time. In addition to pleasant-sounding organizations like Healthy Place, there are many more with worrisome names such as Antipsychiatry.org and Ban Shock, as well as groups such as the Committee for Truth in Psychiatry and the Foundation for Truth in Reality. I click on an article called “ECT and Brain Damage: Psychiatry’s Legacy,” posted by a group called Say No to Psychiatry!

  The story of electric shock began in 1938, when Italian psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti visited a Rome slaughterhouse to see what could be learned from the method that was employed to butcher hogs. In Cerletti’s own words, “As soon as the hogs were clamped by the [electric] tongs, they fell unconscious, stiffened, then after a few seconds they were shaken by convulsions…. During this period of unconsciousness (epileptic coma), the butcher stabbed and bled the animals without difficulty….

  “At this point I felt we could venture to experiment on man, and I instructed my assistants to be on the alert for the selection of a suitable subject.”

  Cerletti’s first victim was provided by the local police—a man described by Cerletti as “lucid and well-oriented.” After surviving the first blast without losing consciousness, the victim overheard Cerletti discussing a second application with a higher voltage. He begged Cerletti, “Non una seconda! Mortifiere!” (“Not another one! It will kill me!”)

  Ignoring the objections of his assistants, Cerletti increased the voltage and duration and fired again. With the “successful” electrically induced convulsion of his victim, Ugo Cerletti brought about the application of hog-slaughtering skills to humans, creating one of the most brutal techniques of psychiatry….

  Electric shock is also called electroconvulsive “therapy” or treatment (ECT), electroshock therapy or electric shock treatment (EST), electrostimulation, and electrolytic therapy (ELT). All are euphemistic terms for the same process: sending a searing blast of electricity through the brain in order to alter behavior….

  ECT is one of the worst and most permanently destructive methods used by psychiatry. Before heavy tranquilizers and muscle relaxers were used to render the patient completely immobile, shock treatments often caused broken vertebrae due to the severity of the force involved with electric shock. There is nothing mild about this “treatment.” Slick advertising campaigns and glossy brochures cannot turn this very harmful procedure into a useful and safe one.

  If a psychiatrist or mental health “professional” tells you that ECT is safe, ask him or her to let you watch as they themselves receive a “treatment.” Their negative response should set your mind straight on the subject. If they do consent, then I suggest getting away from them as quickly as possible—they truly must be crazy as a loon to accept your proposal!

  The website quotes Ernest Hemingway and claims that the reason he shot himself was that shock treatments destroyed his mind. “Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient.”

  Antipsychiatry.org has a page called “Psychiatry’s Electroconvulsive Shock Treatment: A Crime Against Humanity.” At the top of the page is a photograph of a woman in a hospital gown, strapped down to a table, with some kind of bit in her mouth. Wires on either side of her head lead to a box with switches and dials, where two hands wait, seemingly about to throw the switch. Because the woman’s mouth is forced open by the bit, you can’t tell if she’s trying to shout for help. She might be.

  Some psychiatrists falsely claim that ECT consists of a very small amount of electricity being passed through the brain. In fact, the 70 to 400 volts and 200 to 1600 milliamperes used in ECT is quite powerful. The power applied in ECT is typically as great as that found in the wall sockets in your home. It could kill the “patient” if the current were not limited to the head. The electricity in ECT is so powerful it can burn the skin on the head where the electrodes are placed. Because of this, psychiatrists use electrode jelly, also called conductive gel, to prevent skin burns from the electricity. The electricity going through the brain causes seizures so powerful the so-called patients receiving this so-called therapy have broken their own bones during the seizures. To prevent this, a muscle-paralyzing drug is administered immediately before the so-called treatment. Of course, the worst part of ECT is brain damage, not broken bones….

  Defenders of ECT say that because of the addition of anesthesia to make the procedure painless, the horribleness of ECT is entirely a thing of the past. This argument misses the point. It is the mental disorientation, the memory loss, the lost mental ability, the realization after awaking from the “therapy” that the essence of one’s very self is being destroyed by the “treatment” that induces the terror—not only or even primarily physical suffering. ECT, or electroshock, strikes to the core personality and is terrifying for this reason….

  Since the “patient’s” fear of ECT is one of the things that makes ECT “work,” psychiatrists often get results by merely threatening people with ECT.

  I print out my findings. I take them into the men’s room so I can read them in their entirety. I could throw them away, right in this wastebasket under the paper towels, before I leave the library. I could keep quiet about what I know and just watch Dad for signs, hover above Dad’s situation like a guardian angel. What would be the point of show
ing Mom, anyway? We have no other options on the table. We have Plan A but no Plan B.

  When I get home, Dad has gone to bed to prepare for an early start in the morning. Mom is drinking tea and staring out the window over the sink. I doubt she can see anything out there, with lights on inside the house. I hand her the printouts. They’re crumpled, damp, and probably unsanitary. Mom puts down her mug and begins to read them, with one hand at her throat. For a long time she doesn’t react.

  “Not Hemingway!” she eventually gasps. I knew that would get to her—Mom’s master’s was in American studies.

  She shakes her head and leans against the counter. She touches the necklace my father gave her when they were poor. We could be poor again.

  “You may not show any of this to your father or your sister.”

  “You have to cancel the appointment, Mom.”

  She rinses the mug and puts it in the dishwasher without saying anything.

  “Right? Mom? You have to cancel the appointment, or they’ll turn Dad into a zombie.”

  “I’m not going to cancel it.”

  “But look what happened to Hemingway—and all those other, ordinary people. Their minds got wiped out. Anything that was special about them—pfft. And even anything that wasn’t special.”

  “Billy—”

  “Come on, Mom! Where’s that phone number?”

  “Shush.” She lays her hand on my arm, but I knock it away.

  “Don’t shush me! I won’t be shushed anymore!”

  “If you yell and act agitated, you’ll just make things worse. Don’t you want your father to get some rest before his first appointment?”

  “So you’re going, then? You’re doing this to Dad? You don’t even want my opinion.”

  “I want your opinion, only in a lower register.”

  “I won’t let you do it.”

  “Oh, really? How will you stop me?” Mom steps backward. A bag of recycled Brooksbie papers blocks her path, and I don’t even warn her. She doesn’t fall, though.

  Mom has no idea that in the last five minutes of my bike ride I developed a secret plan. If she decides to go ahead with this, I’ll take Dad away. The nights are getting warmer—we could live in a tent on Plum Island. Any court in the United States would see it my way.

  “Billy,” Mom asks me after a while, “what percentage of your father would you say is still there?”

  “Maybe thirty,” I answer. “But at least it’s something.”

  “That’s exactly the figure I was going to give.”

  DAWN

  My social studies teacher, Mr. Misuraca, distributes a test up the aisle. He moves like a trained bear, and every test, no matter what the alleged subject, ends up being about the nineteen sixties.

  Brenda Mason strokes the shoulder of her sweater as she writes her name on the test, almost as if she’s patting herself on the back.

  I write my name but nothing after that.

  They leave the house at dawn.

  They stop for coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, but Dad isn’t allowed to have anything. Mom puts two honey-dipped Munchkins in a wax bag for later, should Dad choose to accept them.

  Uncle Marty drives because Mom and Dad were up most of the night, and Mom’s too tired to drive. In the passenger seat, Mom navigates with the map.

  The landmarks of Route 1 pass their windows. A lighthouse, a ship, and the tower of Pisa, all of which are really restaurants. An orange Tyrannosaurus rex that guards a miniature golf course. They’ve seen it a hundred times, but this time it startles them, and they wonder whatever possessed someone to put it there. Questioning, questioning.

  The traffic doubles and redoubles. The Boston skyline ascends, gathering memories of family trips around it like a broad gray skirt.

  Coolidge Hospital is the size of a town. Marty follows signs for Building G. He drops Mom and Dad in front, then goes to park the car.

  They sign in at the front desk.

  They take the elevator down to the basement.

  The basement is a plain, concrete-walled clinic.

  Dad is wearing his snappy first-day-of-school clothes.

  The other patients are all in pajamas and bathrobes, because they’re living here.

  A nurse calls “Bill Morrison,” and Dad looks up.

  He and Mom are shown into a second room.

  In the second room is a new doctor they’ve never met before.

  He and a nurse take Dad into a third room.

  Dad lies down on one of three beds.

  The nurse straps him in and gives him an injection.

  His body relaxes and his eyes close.

  The nurse smears something on Dad’s head.

  She places an oxygen mask over Dad’s mouth and nose.

  The doctor presses onto Dad’s head two circles attached to a wire.

  He seems to be asleep now.

  The doctor throws a switch.

  May God forgive me.

  That I would do nothing while a doctor sent fire through my father’s body.

  TREATMENT REPORT: DAY 104

  A current passed through Dad’s brain, producing a seizure that lasted thirty seconds. His arms and legs never moved, but his fists clenched involuntarily and his toes twitched.

  Inside Dad’s brain, neurons resembling tall, thin trees stood in groves. Their spidery branches were intertwined, almost touching. Lightning shot from tree to tree and from branch to branch, making the bare wood rattle and hiss. This lightning had the power to revive or destroy whatever buds of thought or nests of memory ever lived there. Dad’s soul walked at the base of the trees, fearful and wondering. Some branches were cut and fell to the ground like dry kindling. Others crackled, swayed, and absorbed the shock, eventually becoming still.

  THIS—

  Is this my inheritance? Red hair, blue eyes, and a dark place in the mind that will call me when my time comes, and I will have to go there?

  Like a church bell, a factory bell, or a funeral bell?

  I am (after all) Bill Junior.

  part three

  TREATMENT REPORT: DAY 109

  Dad has completed three sessions of electroconvulsive therapy, each of which has obliterated his memory of the past twenty-four hours and taken with it some of his other mental abilities, too. In other words, he is even more less-smart than he was from not sleeping, although we hope that one day he will become more smart again.

  THE DARK SPACES

  “Sixteen across: patella.”

  Dad and I are doing the newspaper crossword on a Saturday afternoon while Mom reads a magazine in her chair in the corner. When he was well, we would time ourselves on the crossword puzzle—usually thirty minutes, once as low as twenty-six minutes, thirteen seconds—but now we’re taking all the time we need, not looking at the clock.

  I give him a head start before I make my suggestion. “Okay, how about ‘kneecap’?”

  Dad begins writing in the squares. N-E-E.

  “Wait! There’s a k in ‘kneecap.’”

  “Where?”

  “At the beginning.”

  He erases what he’s done and starts again. The word fits.

  “Does ‘needle’ also have a k?” he asks, trying to find the pattern.

  “No, it doesn’t. But ‘knead’ does, like when you knead dough to make bread. And remember, ‘know’ does, as in ‘I know you.’”

  He nods. “I’m pretty sure I have that one.”

  None of the articles mentioned that the treatments would cause Dad to lose—temporarily, we hope—his ability to spell. But I see it each time we do the crossword puzzle. The first time I noticed it, I felt embarrassed for Dad. Maybe I even pitied him. But now my reaction has changed. For the most part, I feel curious and just basically interested. Because the articles I’ve read say nothing about this problem, I feel like I’ve discovered something. I strangely enjoy watching him and looking for trends in what he does and doesn’t remember. Still, it seems a little cold. I excuse myself by deciding it
’s the kind of thing he himself would find interesting, if it weren’t happening to him.

  A car goes by the picture window, up our hill. Mom lays down her magazine and waves. “The man who stopped in yesterday just went by,” Mom says.

  To help Dad with his memory loss, I’ve developed a technique I call “backgrounding,” and Mom helps me implement it. With this technique, we assume that he remembers nothing, and we fill in for him as much as we can. Normally, Mom might have said just, “There he is again!” about the passing driver. But with my backgrounding program, she beefs up her comment with a short reference to yesterday’s meeting.

  “Someone stopped in yesterday?” Dad asks.

  “Yes,” she answers. “We were just getting out of the car, and he pulled in the driveway. He was thinking of buying the house at the top of the street, and he wanted to know how long we had lived here and what we thought of the highway noise. You were very honest with him and said it bothered you, but we explained that you were a light sleeper and I’m a heavy sleeper.”

  “Uh-huh,” Dad says, waiting to see if the information resurfaces in memory. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. But in giving Dad that information, Mom is treating him as if he can step back into the conversation once he has the background. He can still participate. I call that technique “normalizing.”

  “He must be serious about buying if he’s back again today,” Dad says. “Did he say whether he was a light sleeper?”